Miami based electric scooter company Bird has filed for bankruptcy according to CBS News.

Bird has been struggling with its scooter program profitability for several years and with cities recently banning scooters for safety concerns and scooter fires, Bird without a cash infusion, has ceased operations. Seattle is one of the cities Bird operates in.

The short term rentable electric scooter was touted as a way to reduce carbon emissions and traffic congestion, but in reality, the scooters became an eyesore and safety hazard in many inner cities.

Paris banned electric scooters following partial bans in San Fransisco and Miami citing multiple injuries and fatalities to riders and pedestrians. In London, there have been 37 exploding electric scooters since the beginning of 2023.

In Spokane, the scooters are ending up in the river with estimates showing that over 250 scooters have been pulled from the river by local clubs in 2023 alone.

Most of the assumptions about the benefits of electric scooters rely on a scooter lifespan of two years. In California, they are seeing lifespans of only one to two months, as scooters break quickly. This increases the environmental impact by five times. In other words, your family sedan has less impact on the environment than an electric scooter.

A study from North Carolina State University, “Are e-scooters polluters? The environmental impacts of shared dock-less electric scooter’ written by Joseph Hollingsworth, Brenda Copeland and Jeremiah Johnson, reaches a surprising conclusion. The electric scooters that are being deployed in our cities are not as green as we have been led to believe. And that doesn’t include the carbon emitted by the vehicles needed to clean up the mess when the scooters are abandoned or catch fire.

As with many feel-good environmental policies, the benefits of scooters are frequently inflated while costs are diminished or altogether ignored.

Now it appears that the financial model is unsustainable, without public right of way gifts and lucrative public contracts.

Cities and towns should reconsider the total environmental cost and public benefit of scooters before allowing them into our downtown areas as a serious mode of urban travel.